I am new to these forums and to Macs in general so please be patient with me. I work for a company that does tech support for schools in our area. One of the schools that I work for is an all Mac network/environment. I am new to Macs and have been learning a lot already, but something that comes up on a consistent basis is the need to change login names for teachers that get married or divorced. I need to know of a way that I can change the name and login name, while keeping their home sync working. Right now what happens is I change the name and login information and the home sync stops syncing. I then copy all of the info from their old login to a new home folder and the syncing starts again. Is there a way that I would not have to do the copy and keep it syncing under their old account. Thank you in advance for any advice you can give me.

I work in a similar environment. I started about 8 months ago with no OS X server experience — I'm not a novice by any means, but it has taken quite a bit of research and experimentation to get things working correctly.

It sounds like you're hitting one of two issues: either the renamed user loses permissions to the old home folder, or the old home folder needs to be manually renamed to link to the renamed user. If the former, make sure the user IDs / GUIDs don't change when you rename the user — this should keep the permissions as they should be. If the latter, well, I'm sure you get it.

Granted, I've never had to do such a thing, so this is just me taking a wild guess.

I have a similar job, only I work for a district rather than a 3rd party. I run into this a lot, as well. In my experience, the only way to do it without problems is to make them a new account and ditto their docs over, then delete their cached home and re-sync.

Make sure your Macs are members of WORKGROUP. In SystemPreferences --> Network --> Advanced --> WINS make sure your Macs have a WINS Name and are in WORKGROUP.

On your PCs, make sure they have WORKGROUP membership enabled and have a unique name.

If you don't like the "WORKGROUP" default, your work group can have any name as long as it is consistent on all machines (and not longer than 15 characters...).

Then, if it works (it should...), your PCs will show up in your Finder SideBar. Doubleclick will take you to the shared directories.

The opposite direction is a different, and more painful story. Since the SAMBA creators made the unfortunate (and to me unexplainably silly) move from a friendly license to GPL3, Apple had no other choice than to ditch a perfectly working solution during the Snow Leopard period (or else face legal consequences). As this move of the SAMBA people came as a surprise, the hastily created replacement by Apple has still its growing pains, but it is getting better....